Ethical Issues in Gene Therapy 
from genetic disorders will be compounded by more injustice done 
in the name of concern for the genetic destiny of mankind. 
Rifkin’s main concern is eventual danger to values of “companion- 
ship and belonging’’ (1983, p. 253) from systematic dominance by 
future reproductive engineers who have mastered the science of 
genetic engineering. A willingness to forego all health benefits to 
prevent this specter requires at least three assumptions: (1) that 
genetic technology is the moral problem. (2) that no ‘moral lines’, 
i.e., morally relevant distinctions, can be convincingly drawn between 
medical and eugenic uses of genetic technology, and (3) that ethics 
is determined by the imperative of a technological society, i.e., “If 
it can be done, it must be done”. None of these assumptions is either 
sound or supportable by evidence. 
The first assumption displaces concern about the morality of 
genetic experiments in humans onto the technical means, rather than 
squarely on the clash of moral duties for the persons who would do 
such experiments. Technology is often an occasion for moral con- 
flicts that in turn create moral problems. Because society itself is in 
conflict about such problems, these cases become serious socio-moral 
problems. However, the moral problem is not literally the technology 
but the difficulty of resolving the conflict of duties and principles 
involved. To make technology the problem is to fall into a trap 
endemic to the early stage of moral conflict, i.e., to ‘objectify’ the 
problem and locate it in a thing or person that becomes a scapegoat. 
By this maneuver the problem can be more easily attacked, but the 
result is often simple moralizing rather than moral reasoning. 
Are DNA experiments in single gene disorders a threat to social 
institutions and their values? An approach to disease treatment by 
DNA is morally not different from using any other drug or agent. 
Other human products like blood, organs, hormones, and bone 
marrow are commonplace avenues to therapy. DNA has no special 
ontological status when compared to other human parts. As indicated 
in the first section, it is true that DNA experiments in a clinical set- 
ting will pose difficult choices, but morally viable approaches exist 
for resolution of the problems. To ban gene experiments that may 
help today’s children in the name of protection from uncertain 
dangers of future uses of gene technology would be to act irrationally 
and unfairly. 
Rifkin’s view that “there is no logical place to stop, after somatic 
cell experiments prove successful” is shared by a New York Times 
editorialist (1982a), presumably Nicholas Wade: 
Recombinant DNA Research, Volume 12 
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